The procedure gets its name from its use of the Newtonian laws of the dynamics, or motion, of asteroids as they move around the Solar System.
The procedure works by taking multiple position measurements to determine the gravitational deflection caused when two or more asteroids move past each other.
The method relies on the fact that the large number of known asteroids means they will occasionally move past one another at very close distances.
In this case the equations of motion are the same as for that of Rutherford scattering between oppositely charged objects (so that the force is attractive rather than repulsive).
A more sophisticated description using matrices can be achieved by separating the observed objects position on the sky as a function of time into the sum of two components: one which is a result of the relative motion of the objects themselves, and the other the motion induced by the gravitational influence of the two bodies.