Faint praise, but ambitious of you, nonetheless.
I then went on to take (learn and enjoy) linear algebra and population dynamics which is ENTIRELY math based.
Reminds me of a story. There is a mathematician chatting with a physicist at a party. He asked the physicist what was the work for which he won his Nobel Prize. The physicist goes into a long-winded explanation of the details of his theory. The mathematician ponders for a brief moment and responds, "So you inverted a matrix."
Probably a true story. Gallian's Abstract Algebra book describes how physicists made a breakthrough when they discovered that matrices don't commute. Go figure.
I then went on to earn a MS in Population modeling, which, as I'm sure you know, is a biological discipline based entirely one two things: EVOLUTION and MATH.
Population dynamics,... I'm not familiar with the term, but I'm sure it uses some very sophisticated stochastic differential equations. So, in your classes, do you prove the theorems of Ito calculus from measure theory directly, or do you just take Brownian motion as a given?
Close, but not quite accurate. Werner Heisenberg did re-invent matrix multiplication (from combinations of Fourier series), but Max Born did show him the matrix theory quite early in the game. Matrix theory wasn't that well know to physicists (or anyone else) in the early 1920s.
This is a complete misrepresentation of the breakthrough. The breakthrough was showing that incompatible observables in the real, physical world can be represented by non-Abelian operators. This is by no means a meager accomplishment.
Similarly, the Riemannian geometry used in general relativity was already invented before Einstein came along; his genius was relating real physical parameters to the affine parameters used in the equations.
A.D., if discerning working theories from physical data is so trivial compared to the mathematical manipulation used therein, why haven't mathematicians jumped into the game and snatched up every Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry and medicine awarded over the last 100 years?
It's because the collection and analysis of data is not the intellectually trivial and rote undertaking you presume it to be.