One of my friend who stopped studying maths in high school told me once
You study maths, can you help me fill my tax forms?
In her mind, advancing in maths studies implied manipulating an increasing amount of numbers. The reality I faced was the contrary: I dropped numbers for some more abstract notions (i.e. letters and symbols).
I wonder if a (putative) link between abstraction and use of numbers has been investigated. For instance, can we say that one area of mathematics is more abstract than another one just because it uses less numbers in its formulation? Or, is this particular domain of maths became more complex as it uses less numbers? One possible metric I think of would be the number of numbers per "mathematical" line.
This question may not be within the scope of math.stackexchange, but I didn't find a more suitable site. Thanks!