Also Chinese, Korean, and Japanese have stroke orders and numbers for writing, so much of the foundation of their language is mathematical. We say ‘a’ and you can write it anyway you want as long as you get close, but if you write 亜 it’s written in a specific stroke order and direction, with a certain number of strokes.
Also, most Asian parents force their kids to learn multiplication tables from memory, so kids are used to memorizing formulae, functions, etc.
Within living memory, that was the norm in these United States.