I don't think fortran is faster by language virtue, but it's certainly easier to scrap together high performance numeric fortran code. And ifort/aocc are amazing at making code that runs well on clusters, which is not a priority for any other domain. Fortran is absolutely still on top for modern numerics research code that involves clusters, talk to anyone who works in simulations at a national lab. If your code is mostly matrix math, modern fortran is very nice to work with.
Emphasis on modern because maintaining 70s-80s numeric mathematician cowboy code is a ninth circle of hell. It has a bad rep for that reason.
When you speak about code from the 1970s in particular, you need to appreciate the extremely limited language features that were available.
They did not even have while-loops in the language until Fortran 77. While-loop functionality used to be implemented using DO-loops mixed with GOTOs. You can't fault the people of that era for using the only tools that were available to them.
Emphasis on modern because maintaining 70s-80s numeric mathematician cowboy code is a ninth circle of hell. It has a bad rep for that reason.