Roman then arabic pages

Open almost any thesis or textbook and you will see the same convention: the title page, abstract, table of contents, and acknowledgements are numbered i, ii, iii in lowercase roman numerals, and then the first real chapter starts over at page 1 in ordinary arabic numbers. The front matter is treated as a separate, preliminary sequence, and graduate schools check for this convention explicitly. In LaTeX it takes exactly two commands.

The pattern

\begin{document}
\pagenumbering{roman}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents
\pagenumbering{arabic}
\chapter{Introduction}
...
\end{document}

\pagenumbering{roman} does two things at once: it switches the numeral style to lowercase roman and resets the page counter to 1, so the title page becomes page i. Everything you place after it, typically \maketitle, the abstract, the table of contents, and any lists of figures or tables, gets numbered ii, iii, iv, and so on.

Then, immediately before the first chapter, \pagenumbering{arabic} switches the style back and resets the counter again, so \chapter{Introduction} opens on a fresh page 1. The reset is the whole point: without it your introduction would start on something like page 7, which is not what committees or citation conventions expect.

Because \chapter in the book and report classes always starts a new page, you do not need an explicit \newpage before the switch. In a class without chapters you would add \clearpage first so the numbering change does not land mid-page.

Classes that do it for you

Some thesis classes provide \frontmatter / \mainmatter / \backmatter. These come from the book class and are the higher-level way to say the same thing: \frontmatter switches to roman numbering and makes chapters unnumbered (so a Preface gets no “Chapter 1” label), \mainmatter switches to arabic and restores numbered chapters, and \backmatter turns chapter numbering off again for appendix-like material at the end. If your university’s template is built on book or memoir, prefer these commands over raw \pagenumbering, because the template may hook extra behavior onto them, such as different headers for front matter. The two approaches do not conflict, but there is no reason to use both.

One thing to check

The roman-numbered pages should agree with your table of contents. If your abstract shows as page “iv” in the ToC but prints as “2”, the usual cause is a \pagenumbering call placed after the content it was supposed to cover, or a missing second compile: page numbers in the ToC come from the .aux file, so you need to compile twice before judging whether the numbering is right. Compile, compile again, then compare the ToC against the actual pages.