This is a claim that's thrown around a lot by scientists (and people who want to sound smart), but it seems the people who say this don't really understand what the term "universal" means. Math, like any other language, is a learned system of communication. If you don't have the specific learned cultural knowledge to decipher what somebody is trying to communicate, it's just a bunch of gobbledygook.
First, let's look at the symbols:
< = > + - x ÷ ² ³ √
These don't have any "universal" inherent meaning. If you didn't know what these symbols meant, you wouldn't understand what was being said in the "language" of a mathematical equation.
"But wait!" you say, "It's not the symbols themselves, but the concepts they represent which are universal!"
Alright then, let's look at a mathematical language in common use: Binary.
Computers use binary for everything, right? Binary numbers have no inherent context beyond just being numbers. Without knowing what patterns a computer uses to decode binary number strings, you can read the data straight from a hard drive and get nothing but a long string of 1s and 0s. Sure, with enough time, effort and content, you could probably eventually figure out what they represented just like deciphering any other verbal or written linguistic system, but if math is such a "universal" language, shouldn't the meaning behind those numbers be intrinsically obvious? There's actually a form of written language (Ogham) which is a bit like binary and the Trigrams from the I Ching are basically binary representations, but those are also not a "universal" language, as they require a translation key to understand what they represent. This scene from Kyle XY simply wouldn't be possible, because not only is there insufficient context in a brief glimpse of the crash code on a computer screen to figure out the underlying patterns of information, but the intricacies of the binary information of an image file can't be properly represented by a standard ASCII text program in the first place - the format is different. (a keyboard doesn't have all the ASCII characters on it anyway) Opening a non-text file in a text editor and then saving it, even without making any changes, will often corrupt the information within the file and make it unuseable for its original purpose. Regardless of how smart a person is, they simply can't read and manipulate binary code from a display which isn't designed to do so and therefore is subject to fundamental interpretation errors.
Another example: Base-10 versus Hexidecimal versus Binary.
10 - 1 = ?
Base-10: 9
Hexidecimal: f
Binary: 1
If mathematics is a "universal" language, how does the same simple equation yield such staggeringly different results with such a simple modification of context? If we assumed base-10 was the norm and sent that equation to somebody who assumed we were using a base-8 number system, there would be a big misunderstanding.
Imagine if you suddenly had to start calculating everything in the format of time.
1 x 60 = 100 and 100 x 24 = 10000 and so on. It would make communicating with people who tended to use standard base-10 for everything not time related a bit more difficult, wouldn't it? What if we had to communicate a concept of time with somebody from another planet, which might rotate at a different speed and orbit their sun at a different rate and where the people might have chosen to break up the increments differently? It would be a bit like converting back and forth between Metric and Imperial measurements. How often do you have to convert a measurement from one to the other when trying to communicate with somebody from another country? Doesn't that require prior knowledge of the specific system they use? That doesn't seem very "universal" now does it?
Last example: PEMDAS.
It stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction - or, the official predetermined order of functions in an equation. That's so if you have something like 2 x 3² + 5 ÷ 3 you know which order to work the functions within the equation, because that often changes the outcome. If there was no predetermined order, two different people could often solve the same equation in different ways and get completely different results, even though neither was technically wrong. The official order we use is something somebody had to decide at some point. If we ever have to
communicate with an alien culture like in the movies, they might have
decided to do things very differently and we simply wouldn't arrive at
the same result using the same equations.
So in conclusion, mathematics requires knowledge and understanding of specific cultural symbols, specific cultural procedures and specific applicable context in order to be a useful form of communication and therefore is not a "universal" language at all.