To some extent, yes. But the point was that Einstein was probably only able to develop GR thanks to work by people like Riemann, who investigated these things not knowing where they'd lead half a century later. For QM it was almost the other way around and people really had to come up with and formalise a whole new branch of mathematics to make sense of the early experiments. Sometimes physics follows math and sometimes math follows physics. For QM it was closer to the latter.