Murray Gell-Mann's fortunate encounter with mathematician Richard Earl Block at Caltech, in the fall of 1960, "enlightened" him to introduce a novel classification scheme, in 1961, for hadrons, elementary particles that participate in the strong interaction. A similar scheme had been independently proposed by Yuval Ne'eman, and is now explained by the quark model. Gell-Mann referred to the scheme as the "eightfold way", because of the "octets" of particles in the classification (the term is a reference to the Eightfold Path of Buddhism).