A common misconception is that math as it is now or even an archaic version of it just burst into existence. Mathematics grew from what she said, this idea that "yeah i have two things, so let me call that something so i don't have to say x item, x item" https://twitter.com/orbitantonio/status/1298857743306985472

It took centuries for people to move beyond this idea of i have one thing then i have more than one thing. Because yeah, all you really needed to know was "do you have more than one?"

The notion of "zero" was actually heavily contested by people and old mathematicians, why would you need the concept of nothingness in math, how is having nothing supposed to further the day to day calculations you have.

We would spend centuries just having this "idea" (no symbols yet) of what we now call "one, two, etc."

Then after that people started learning how to document things. And a natural power to do have to have abundance, so you wanted to have records of how much food do you have

So the advent of any number system actually came about because rulers started to need a better way to know how much wealth (surplus food) they had.

Basic arithmetic came soon after because you dont wanna have to recount every single time you get something new.

After years of other civilizations developing their own number system, some mathematician in India proposed the idea that nothing (zero) is something useful for calculations. It's not intuitive for humans, and that's why people weren't so accepting of it.

But after centuries,

it catches on for most of the mathematicians. I believe "algebra" (having an unknown/variable to solve for) came after that because you.

So long story short, math has never been a physical, tangible thing. It's a system in which we understand things in the world.

But math is real, in the sense that if you took off the symbology, the concepts should still ring true, like

"If i add two apples with a group of three apples, it should be the same as if i added four apples with one apple." (Think of this visually, as opposed to "three")

Also here's a fun thought practice, if you close your eyes and try to visualize an apple or any single object, then add another of the same object, and continue.

Most people will probably look the clear image of the object by the time they add the 6th one.

Humans arent designed to think in big incremental ways, that's why we invented the symbols we have, so we dont have to be bad at doing calculations.