Chapter 74, verse 30 of the Quran says of a guarded thing: "Over it is nineteen." Twenty-nine of the book's chapters open with combinations of disconnected Arabic letters, the Muqatta'at, that the tradition has revered for fourteen centuries without explaining. This project is about what happens when you stop revering those letters and start counting them.
Group the letters across the twenty-nine marked chapters by their shared initials and you get thirteen totals. Every one divides by nineteen. They sum to a single number. Independently, counting no letters at all, the total word count of those same twenty-nine chapters lands on that same number. Two unrelated counts, one value.
The discipline
Numerical claims about scripture have a long and mostly embarrassing history, because the method usually has too much freedom: change what you count, or how, until the answer appears. This project is built to remove that freedom, not to exploit it.
It works on the standard, canonical text. No verse is deleted to make a total land. The few structural decisions it does make, choosing a recognized verse-boundary convention in four chapters, and a handful of word-segmentation fixes in chapters that carry no initials at all, are named in the open and remove not a single word of revelation. Eight of the thirteen letter groups require no variant choice whatsoever. The other five depend on one disclosed parameter, and the work tells you exactly what survives if you reject it: the eight clean groups, the independent word count, and the book-level totals, all still divisible by nineteen.
The full proof ships as a script anyone can run against the public Tanzil text, with source hashes included. The point is to make it easy to break, not impossible. If the count is wrong, it can be shown wrong by anyone who can count.
Why a name is on it now
For years this work was published anonymously, on a simple principle: a claim about a number in a text does not need a person standing behind it, and is stronger without one. That principle is still true, and it is why the project will always lead with the proof and not with a biography.
But anonymity also means no one to answer for the work, no one to take it to people who ask hard questions, no one to stand behind it in public and be wrong out loud if it is wrong. At some point that costs more than it protects. So the work is now done in the open, by named people who consent to be named. You can see who they are on the team page.
This changes nothing about how you should treat the claim. The first person to point a computer at this question, in the 1970s, found a real signal and then spent his authority on everything around it: he edited the text to protect his totals, predicted the end of the world, and finally claimed a title for himself. When he fell, the mathematics fell with him, because he had tied the two together. A name on this work is here to be accountable, not to be followed. Trust the count, not the researcher.
What to do with it
Do not take any of this on faith, including the part where it says not to take it on faith. Download the proof. Run it. Change the inputs and watch what breaks and what does not. Read the writing for the history and the reasoning. Then decide for yourself what a number that names itself inside its own text is supposed to mean. That last step belongs to you, and the project takes no part in it. This is on purpose, and it follows the book's own example: the truth has come from your Lord, so let whoever wishes believe and whoever wishes reject (18:29). The sign is placed in view. The choice was never the project's to make for you.
The Quran is the blueprint
Everything about how this project behaves is taken from the book it is about, not added on top of it. The work is given away with nothing asked in return, because the messengers in the Quran say it plainly, each in turn, I ask no reward of you, my reward is only with the Lord of the Worlds (26:109). It invites and never compels, because the book says there is no compulsion in religion (2:256). It asks you to look for yourself rather than trust a name, because the book keeps asking the same question, will they not think about this Quran? (4:82). And the man who counted it claims none of it, because the structure was set in the text long before him and only waited to be found. The aim was never to talk about the Quran from the outside. It is to let the Quran set the terms.