Fortran is just naturally suited for numerical programming. You tend to have a large amount of numbers in such programs, typically arranged arrays. Arrays are first class citizens in Fortran and it is often pretty straight forward to translate numerical kernels from Matlab into Fortran.
Regarding potential performance advantages see the other answers, that cover this quite nicely. The baseline is probably you can create highly efficient numerical applications with most compiled languages today, but you might jump through some loops to get there. Fortran was carefully designed to allow the compiler to recognize most spots for optimizations, due to the language features. Of course you can also write arbitrary slow code with any compiled language, including Fortran.
In any case you should pick the tools as suited. Fortran suits numerical applications, C suits system related development. On a final remark, learning Fortran basics is not hard, and it is always worthwhile to have a look into other languages. This opens a different view on problems you want to solve.
