Friends, a colleague of mine showed me a book with a intriguing chapter structure:
I was wondering how we could achieve something similar. I understand that this unusual numbering will break the counters, and I don't expect the chapter numbers to be set automatically, but I'd like to see how it could work even with a manual chapter numbering assignment.
As a minimum working example, I wrote a single code with some chapters added:
\documentclass[oneside]{book}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\chapter{Before the beginning} % Chapter -1
\lipsum[2]
\chapter{Much ado about nothing} % Chapter 0
\lipsum[2]
\chapter{Small is beautiful} % Chapter 0.000000001
\lipsum[2]
\chapter{All is one} % Chapter 1
\lipsum[2]
\chapter{Murdering irrationals} % Chapter \sqrt{2}
\lipsum[2]
\chapter{Golden Phi} % Chapter \Phi
\lipsum[2]
\end{document}
Any ideas?