During the 1650s, Huygens studied collisions between hard spheres and deduced a principle that is now identified as the conservation of momentum. Christopher Wren would later deduce the same rules for elastic collisions that Huygens had, and John Wallis would apply momentum conservation to study inelastic collisions. Newton cited the work of Huygens, Wren, and Wallis to support the validity of his third law.