PRINCETON, N.J. — A century ago, on May 29, 1919, the universe was momentarily perturbed, and Albert Einstein became famous.

On Wednesday at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein’s intellectual home from 1932 until his death in 1955, scholars celebrated the centenary with an afternoon symposium titled “The Universe Speaks in Numbers.” The premise: that nature reveals itself through patterns, which can be described with numbers and probed through problems posed by mathematicians and physicists alike. The event’s name was borrowed from the title of a new book by Graham Farmelo, who gave the introductory talk.

“This is actually a good story,” said Helmut Hofer, a mathematician at the Institute, sitting in his office. Behind him, on the wall, hung an axiom that his wife had found and framed:

“Mathematics is such a drama queen. It can’t seriously have that many problems.”

Having the right mathematicians in the company of the right physicists can be quite helpful in solving problems, said Dr. Hofer .

Einstein himself apparently had no special plans for what he knew could be a momentous day. He was home in Berlin. He wrote a letter admitting a “blunder” in an ongoing debate with Theodor Kaluza, a German mathematician with a new notion of space-time that required five dimensions.