Is nature really a mathematician?
Calculus and algebra were the only basis of mechanics until general relativity came along. Then the “useless” tensor calculus developed by Ricci, Levi Civita, Riemann etc suddenly described, say, celestial mechanics to untold decimal places.
There’s the famous story of Hugh Montgomery presenting the Riemann Zeta Function to Freeman Dyson where the latter made a connection between the function’s zeroes and nuclear energy levels.
Why does nature “hide” its use of advanced math? Why are Chern classes, cohomology, sheafs, category theory used in physics?