Suppress chapter numbers & \renewcommand{\chaptername}

Question

I am writing a amsbook document in Latex. The \chapter{On Banach Spaces} command produces something like this:

CHAPTER 1

On Banach Spaces

I would like it to say

CHAPTER

On Banach Spaces

instead. (No trailing chapter number.)

Why do I want this? I like the layout of amsbook and for the very first chapter I want the leading text to say "INTRODUCTION" then in a next line the title of the introduction. After this introduction I want normal chapter numbering.

This somehow works when I use

\renewcommand{\chaptername}{Introduction}

before the introduction chapter, then

\setcounter{chapter}{0}

\renewcommand\chaptername{Chapter}

just before the second chapter.

Unfortunately this gives me a "INTRODUCTION 1", however I want "INTRODUCTION". So basically, I like to suppress the chapter number.

(Edited.)

Answer 1

I'm not sure I understand your problem 100%, but here are two things to try.

First, I don't know from amsbook, but the regular old book class defines three very-high-level sectioning commands, \frontmatter, \mainmatter, and \backmatter. If you put \frontmatter immediately after \begin{document}, and \mainmatter immediately before the \chapter command for the first chapter that should have a number, then that might well do what you want. However, it may have other effects that you don't want, like changing page breaks or taking things out of the table of contents. (I can't find any online reference for these commands, say sorry.)

A more low-level approach is to use secnumdepth to suppress section numbers. Try something like this:

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{-1}
\chapter{Introduction}

...

\setcounter{secnumdepth}{1} % or 2 for numbered sections, or whatever
\setcounter{chapter}{0}
\chapter{The first chapter}

...

Answer 2

Just type

\chapter*{Introduction}

Then, from the next chapter,

\chapter{The Title of The First Chapter}