That argument confuses 'loving math' with 'loving things made of math'. I enjoy eating cake and playing video games, that does not make me a chemist and developer.
Your parent comment missed the point of his parent.
But I'm still looking at y = cos(x) * e^-x^2 -- the picture only confirms the mathematical identity. So it is with Avatar -- when we watch Avatar, we're looking at math.
And much of nature is defined using math -- note that I said, not described, but defined. Here's an example -- there are species of locusts (cicadas, actually) that reproduce at 13-year and 17-year intervals. Until recently, no on knew why. It turns out that both 13 and 17 are prime numbers, and this ties into a survival strategy hatched by natural selection (quite by chance). All explained here:
In other words, the locust survival strategy is math speaking out loud.
If you read a book in which a seashore is described, do you argue that the description isn't germane to the thing being described? If the writer isn't skilled, or the reader is lacking in the capacity for visualization, then that is perhaps a legitimate objection, but for most people, words convey meaning. So does math. Math is a language in much the same way that words are a language.
The distinction between "loving math" and "loving things made of math" is dubious at best. When P.A.M. Dirac wrote his now-famous equation that describes how relativistic electrons behave, he noticed that it had two solutions -- sort of like a quadratic equation.
At first he doubted that there could really be two kinds of matter, as his equation suggested. But within a few years antimatter was observed, and Dirac forever afterward wished he had been willing to take his own equation at face value and predict antimatter himself.
My point? The math told him something about reality that no one knew, even him. To put it another way, the math was reality.
Your parent comment missed the point of his parent.