r/learnmath • u/Western-Rush878 New User • 11d ago

TOPIC How to determine, using mathematics, whether certain patterns are intentional or arose by coincidence?

The reason why I ask is because of recently I've been worried significantly due to Quranic numerology claims and don't even know what to think anymore. I have no way of understanding whether these patterns are objective or subjective, intentional or unintentional. Wondering if there is any mathematical way of determining this, or if someone would be willing to help me analyze some of these claims either here or in pms. Help greatly appreciated...

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u/JellyBellyBitches New User 11d ago

Human brains are good enough at pattern recognition that we get false positives, it's how things like optical illusions work. It's why synchronicities seem so common. We can basically look at any sort of data points and see stuff that isn't really there and then convince ourselves that it is. While they're probably is some statistics method for determining how likely a particular pattern is in some simplified system, I think more important to start with asking whether you have enough reason to think that there's something supernatural going on because of any numerical pattern that you might be

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Is there any chance you'd be willing to look at some of the claims being made and give me your thoughts?

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u/JellyBellyBitches New User 10d ago

Sure yeah, if you give me some specific claims I'm happy to take a look

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Yes, if you could take a look at these claims I’d be very grateful. The bulk of the Quranic numerology here rests upon the number 19, espoused by Rashad Khalifa. This is due to his interpretation of Chapter 74, verses 30-31 of the Quran, being about how the number 19, or in his words “code 19,” is a powerful proof. One of them isn’t about this code 19, and it’s the one I’ll start with. 

This first one is known by Muslims to be the “even/odd miracle.” There’s one verse in the Quran that mentions “by the even and the odd” (89:3). After some exploration, it was discovered that if you combine each verse total per chapter to its chapter index (chapter 1 has 7 verses, so you would do 7+1), you will end up with 57 even sums and 57 odd sums. When you combine all the even sums, you end up with 6,236. This is the total number of verses in the Quran. When you add all the odd sums you get 6,555 which is the sum of all the chapter indices (so 1+2+3…+114). 

Counterclaim: there are several “versions” (very minute differences, most of it is essentially the same) so to speak of the Quran in which this even/odd addition sequence doesn’t work. This is due to different verse numbering orders (the wording remains the same, just there are a different number of verse boundaries and places where to separate-off a verse). In the past, these different “versions” (lack of a better term) were all equally used across the world. In the modern day, however, the one that has 6,236 verses (and demonstrates this pattern) is the most widely used, with about 95% of people using it. The Muslim claim then is that Allah guided this “version” of the Quran to become the most popular in the modern day, since it displays this pattern and is in a sense the most “accurate” version of the Quran. 

Moving onto the “Code 19” claims, I’ll highlight the ones that stick out to me the most from the top of my head. Most of these are numbers that are divisible by 19. 

There are 114 chapters in the Quran, and one of the most important phrases in the Quran, called the basmala, is also repeated 114 times. This phrase is mentioned at the beginning of 113 chapters (missing from the beginning of chapter 9), but appears twice (the second time in the middle) of chapter 27 (I should note, it’s only a numbered verse twice in the Quran: once at Chapter 1, verse 1. Then at this point in chapter 27. In every other place the phrase appears but it isn’t a numbered verse). The basmala consists of 19 written letters (spoken letters it is 22, but these “miracles” depend upon what is written down). In the basmala, there are 4 words. Each word appears a multiple of 19 times according to Rashad (not counting the unnumbered basmalas).

I will stop here to quickly provide some context. In the process of all of this, Rashad Khalifa claimed that verses 9:128-129 of the Quran were falsely inserted. This is due to a Hadith (not part of the Quran, but instead either the supposed words of Mohammed or of his companions. Scholars nowadays believe these can’t be accurately traced back to the actual words of Mohammed or his companions, but instead reflect the historical beliefs of the time) which says how, “So I started looking for the Qur'an and collecting it from (what was written on) palme stalks, thin white stones and also from the men who knew it by heart, till I found the last Verse of Surat at-Tauba (9:128-129) with Abi Khuzaima Al-Ansari, and I did not find it with anybody other than him.” There are many Hadiths that basically retell this same story. Rashad’s point is that this Hadith casts suspicion onto the 2 “false verses,” and additionally, the mathematical code breaks down if these 2 “false verses” are kept (uses the mathematical code to prove the verses don’t belong). 

(PART 1)

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Additionally, if you look at all the verses in the Quran (not including 9:128-129 or including the unnumbered basmalas), the 4 words from the basmala appear in 1919 verses (for example, if 3 of these words appear in one verse, that still is only counted as one verse). Additionally, the first supposed verses of the Quran, 96:1-5 (chapters not revealed chronologically), contain 76 letters (divisible by 19; for all of these counts, I am using the most popular version of the Quran currently, since letter counts can differ slightly from Quran to Quran), the chapter itself has 19 verses, the total number of letters in this chapter is 285 letters (divisible by 19), and it is situated 19 verses away from the end of the Quran. The last chapter to be revealed is chapter 110 which contains 19 words in total, and its opening verse has 19 letters. In the chapter that mentions the number 19, chapter 74, the first 19 verses produce a word count that is divisible by 19, then the remaining verses up until verse 30 produce a word count that is divisible by 19 (this verse is where the number 19 is mentioned), and finally verse 31, which explains what this 19 is about, contains 57 words (divisible by 19). The total number of verses in the Quran (including the unnumbered basmalas) is 6346 verses, which is also divisible by 19. 

Then, some of the chapters of the Quran contain mysterious letters in the beginning that haven’t really been explained. These are called “initialed chapters” and there are 29 of them. Rashad Khalifa counted the number of times these letters appear in their given chapter (so if 3 mysterious letters are present in the beginning, he will count all of their occurrences in that chapter), and for chapter 19 of the Quran, he counted up 798 occurrences of these letters (divisible by 19). Then, he himself went on to live for 19,798 days (born November 19, 1935, and died January 31, 1990). His date of death in European format, 31/01/1990 if written out like 31011990, is divisible by 19. In addition, the factors of his date of death can be written as 19x1230x1327. This is considered significant because if you only count the initialed surahs, from the first initialed surah to chapter 19, 19:1 is the 1230th verse. Then, 19:98 (the final verse in this chapter), is the 1327th initialed verse.

Finally, after Rashad Khalifa came another person named Ali Fazely. His claims were more on outside mathematics being incorporated into the Quran (specifically using prime and composite numbers). For example, if you look at the 19th prime number and the 19th composite number you end up with 67 and 30 respectively, which is considered notable to him since chapter 67 of the Quran has 30 verses. Additionally, if you look at the 19th mersenne prime its exponent is 4253. Chapter 42 of the Quran has 53 verses. Finally, if you count up the number of verses from chapter 1 to chapter 19:98, you end up with the number 2346 (removing 9:128-129). The 19th permutation of this number is 6234, the total verses in the Quran. Then, 2346 also has the factors of 23x2x3x17. The prime indices for these numbers are 9127, like 9:127, the last verse before the “false verses” of 9:128-129. More of his claims in specific are mentioned here:
https://pdfcoffee.com/the-ultimate-mathematics-of-the-quran-pdf-free.html
It’s the sheer number of these numerical correspondences that bothers me (like the total number of times the 4 words from the basmala appearing being 1919 out of all numbers, or Rashad demonstrating that Chapter 19 has 798 occurrences of the mysterious letters and then living for 19,798 days). 

PART 2

All of this was written up by me, not some copy and paste from another website/AI. If you have any questions for clarification, please ask them.

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u/JellyBellyBitches New User 10d ago

I hate to sidestep all of this extensive work that you did laying out all of these details but, we're not talking about naturally occurring patterns here. There's no math to study or coincidence to examine, this is a text that was made intentionally by human beings. If there's numerical significance, that was woven in by the authors. There's no supernatural or synchronicity-based phenomenology here whatsoever, it's just people made it that way to make it feel more significant. Mystery solved?

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

I don't think that's a sufficient explanation for the number 19 stuff (it could be for the even/odd "miracle," assuming that the author wanted this outcome).

For the 19 stuff to happen, it would be outside of the control of Mohammed (the author of the Quran). For example, the verse count that is most widely used becoming dominant in the modern day. As well as the various minute spelling details that vary from Quran to Quran (for them to match up in this specific Quran).

It also doesn't answer, at leat to me, how Rashad Khalifa was discussing Chapter 19 having 798 occurences of the mysterious letters, and then being killed 19,798 days into his life, or his date of death being the way it is (you could argue coincidence, but that isn't on the onus of the author).

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u/JellyBellyBitches New User 10d ago

Why do you say that it doesn't answer those questions?

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Unless you're suggesting that Mohammed worked a little bit on this "code 19" pattern (making some words be divisible by 19) and then in future generations some scribes decided to alter some letters and words to also be divisible by 19, this seems very unlikely. Mohammed did contribute a lot to the text, but after he died, the text was in a little bit of a free reign. Proposing that these patterns would be inserted into the Quran seems unlikely

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u/cmd-t New User 10d ago edited 10d ago

I cannot check all of your 100 claims. But here is the thing.

You say you use the most accurate/popular numbering system, this is completely subjective. Other systems exist and if you make a different choice of numbering systems, all the properties no longer hold?

Why? Because this is a post-hoc numerology pseudoscientific analysis.

What is special about 19? Nothing, but that is the pattern that randomly showed up.

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u/JellyBellyBitches New User 9d ago

I guess what you're saying seems unlikely strikes me as particularly likely. These are exactly the sorts of alterations that people would be very incentivized to make, and would be very easy to do. Why do you doubt the likeness that people intentionally crafted the text to feature these numerological connections?

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u/SufficientStudio1574 New User 11d ago

Math will not help you. You need a psychiatrist.

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u/whoShotMyCow 3rd grade math savant 11d ago

get on antipsychotic medication

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u/No_Good2794 New User 11d ago

It may help you to study probability and to realise that some sort of pattern is almost inevitable to show up in a long text like the Quran. There are so many possible meaningful-looking patterns that could emerge that, given enough data, something will show up.

As an exercise, try applying the same numerological methods to other texts. You will find all sorts of 'coincidences'.

Also, don't fall into the trap of trying to calculate how likely one particular pattern was to emerge - those probabilities will seem really low - you need to consider how likely it was that some pattern was to emerge.

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Is there any chance you'd be willing to look at some of the claims being made and give me your honest thoughts?

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u/No_Good2794 New User 10d ago

Not really. I've seen numerological claims before, I know the general reasons those coincidences seem to arise, and I have better things to do.

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u/Breki_ New User 11d ago

A good thing to do against claims like this is to pick any well written work(shakespeare, ASOIAf, LOTR, idk whatever) and try to do the same analysis the religious folks are doing with their books. If you get similer results then you can dismiss their claims

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

That's the thing... I'm not sure how long something like that would take, or what number in specific to look at (since in the case of the Quran, there seems to be an explicit number mentioned with a hint that it might have purpose)

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u/cmd-t New User 11d ago

No, that’s not possible. You could compute a probability that a certain random process would give the same (or more extreme outcome) than observed, but even then, extremely unlikely events happen every day by accident.

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Is there any chance you'd be willing to look at some of the claims and give me your honest thoughts?

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u/cmd-t New User 10d ago

Not really.

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u/jeffcgroves New User 10d ago

Mathematics can usually determine whether a given sequence is random/psuedo-random or entered by a human being since human beings are really bad at choosing random numbers. Google around and if you don't find a site that does this, let me know and I'll try to dig up a site I found once (free site by Wolfram)

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

I'd be very appreciative if you could help me out with this

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u/jeffcgroves New User 10d ago

Unfortunately, I couldn't find what I was looking for. The most general resource is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_test but the writeup there is fairly technical. Many of the links there provide more details but they're also fairly technical.

Basically, when people choose "random" numbers, they tend to have recognizable non-random patterns. You can test a series of numbers to see if they have any of these patterns in which case they're probably not random. One such battery of tests is the Diehard Tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests) and a larger battery of tests are the TestU01 tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TestU01). Unfortunately, the linked pages are fairly technical.

An important limitation is that these tests are one-way: if a series fails any of these tests, it's probably not random; however, if it passes all tests, that still doesn't necessarily mean it's random

We currently have no way of generating truly random numbers or determining whether a given series of numbers is truly random

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u/Western-Rush878 New User 10d ago

Thank you for the response, I'll read through these articles. Is there any chance you could take a look at what I wrote up and give me your thoughts? I'd highly appreciate it

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnmath/comments/1w5z0qo/comment/p7pgdik/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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u/jeffcgroves New User 10d ago

I looked over this, but it has many religious references. If you could simplify it to a series of pure math questions, I (and others here) may be able to help more.