But this is only true of a minority of “concepts.” There are a handful of fundamental principles in most physical sciences, such as the conservation laws (conservation of mass, momentum, energy, charge, etc.). These have a description in words, but most other scientific concepts fall out of the mathematics of working with these first principles, and you have to perform these mathematics to make them useful in any practical way. Engineering is essentially a type of applied physics, and in order to apply physics, you have to translate the ideas into useful formulae.
I, too, find algebra to be tedious. However, it is often a necessary tedium. Using strictly numerical values obfuscates the actual physics. If instead you use variables and don’t substitute numbers, it is much, much easier to see (or calculate, as the case may be) the relationships between the variables and the implications that has on the physical situation.
Science, in one sense, is equations. The entire point of science is to use observations of the world around us and our knowledge of mathematics in order to translate the physical observations into useful mathematical models of varying degrees of complication. Mathematics is the language of science. You cannot decouple the two.