When Newton published his laws of motion in 1687, he fired the starting gun for the scientific revolution. In demonstrating the mathematics behind gravity and the movement of planets, he showed that the natural world could be viewed as a vast machine that ran like clockwork. Other scientists, like Kelvin and Carnot in the 1840s, used this approach to analyze steam engines and developed the laws of thermodynamics and entropy.
These two strands of physical science were then fused together by Boltzmann and Maxwell in the 1890s with the development of statistical thermodynamics. This modeled gasses as a collection of tiny billiard balls, which when statistically aggregated together created the pressure in a steam engine.
Most of the tools of aggregate risk modelling in insurance today, like the Monte Carlo method, stem from this work.