[chemotaxis]

> I think the biggest mistake people make when thinking about mathematics is that it is fundamentally about numbers. It’s not. Mathematics is fundamentally about relations.

Eh, but you can also say that about philosophy, or art, or really, anything.

What sets mathematics apart is the application of certain analytical methods to these relations, and that these methods essentially allow us to rigorously measure relationships and express them in algebraic terms. "Numbers" (finite fields, complex planes, etc) are absolutely fundamental to the practice of mathematics.

For a work claiming to do mathematics without numbers, this paper uses numbers quite a bit.