The symbols are human. But any hypothetical alien race is going to develop the same techniques but with their own symbols.
I would agree that any sufficiently advanced critters would develop counting and arithmetic. In order to develop the science necessary for space travel, they'd need to develop a language that includes zero, a manipulatable system of counting and arithmetical operations, placeholder symbols for problem solving, etc. They would need to have a language that allows for the manipulation of observed data, expression of the relationships between those data, etc.
I would say that a lot of the language will be symbolically the same - just like human languages have a substantial amount of symbolic similarity - concepts and terms for me and you and we and they and fire and water and the other descriptive nomenclature needed to be able to transmit knowledge from one individual to another. They will be substantially similar and translatable, because the objective real phenomenon that they're describing are the same things.
I'm not convinced that aliens would necessarily develop all of the same techniques. Many of the fundamentals, sure, assuming we're not talking about a species with a crazy kind of telekinesis that lets them mentally warp spacetime without actually having to develop mathematical relationships in the first place. But set theory, or imaginary numbers? Maybe not. Maybe not even linear algebra. They may not even have developed modular math if they evolved in a relatively homogeneous way.