Numbers game: Is math the language of nature or just a human construct?

Nearly twenty years after I graduated high school and my last calculus class, I still get that nightmare where I’m at the exam for a calculus course I somehow forgot to attend, or that I faked my way through with absolutely no idea what was going on. “But over the course of the 19th Century, developments in both mathematics and science undermined this view.” Euclidean geometry remains “true” in one of a wide range of possible “abstract mathematical spaces.” Geometry as developed by Euclid, she said, was once thought to be “a unique collection of undeniable truths about physical space.” But then non-Euclidean geometries were developed and so Euclidean geometry was reduced to one competing theory among many. That comforting idea came under pressure when the burgeoning and wildly successful field of applied differential equations — the leading tool of physical sciences at the time — turned out to be based on an effective 'smoothing out' of a complicated and chaotic atomic microworld.” In “Defending the Axioms,” Maddy describes the way we’ve gone from mathematics being seen by Plato as an eternal form, like truth or beauty, to identifying math and science as almost one discipline, or at least equals working together, from the time of the scientific revolution onward, to beginning to accept that math and the real world might diverge significantly, thanks to the introduction of new mathematical concepts like n-dimensional spaces and negative numbers in the first half of the 19th Century. It can, however, it can be challenging to fellow scientists and theoreticians as well as the rest of us to grasp what statements like the following, from "Our Mathematical Universe," actually mean: “We’re on a planet in a galaxy in a universe that I think is in a doppelgänger-laden Level I multiverse in a more diverse Level II multiverse in a quantum-mechanical Level III multiverse in a Level IV multiverse of all mathematical structures.” After some back-and-forth with Salon, Tegmark ultimately wasn’t able to make time for an interview, suggesting that our Level 1 multiverse is a busy place in human terms, however elegant its mathematical structures may be. Worse is that you get yourself into “a situation where you couldn’t tell the difference between the universe and nothing.” Is it possible, though, that rather than being circular arguments or an argument that ultimately misses the point of what makes reality real, that we are challenged in grasping the idea that the universe is math — our instinctive reluctance to accept that a table might be adequately defined by mathematics — by our own cognitive limits, which make us insist on cosmically irrelevant qualities of this table of ours, rather than the important stuff — what we’d consider the more quantitative or mathematical aspects of a thing.