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The ratio of the volume of a sphere to the volume of its circumscribed cylinder is 2:3, as was determined by Archimedes. The principal formulae derived in On the Sphere and Cylinder are those mentioned above: the surface area of the sphere, the volume of the contained ball, and surface area and volume of the cylinder.
Thus, the segment volume equals the sum of three volumes: two right circular cylinders one of radius a and the second of radius b (both of height /) and a sphere of radius /. The curved surface area of the spherical zone—which excludes the top and bottom bases—is given by =.
The sphere has the smallest surface area of all surfaces that enclose a given volume, and it encloses the largest volume among all closed surfaces with a given surface area. [11] The sphere therefore appears in nature: for example, bubbles and small water drops are roughly spherical because the surface tension locally minimizes surface area.
The basic quantities describing a sphere (meaning a 2-sphere, a 2-dimensional surface inside 3-dimensional space) will be denoted by the following variables r {\displaystyle r} is the radius, C = 2 π r {\displaystyle C=2\pi r} is the circumference (the length of any one of its great circles ),
Plot of the surface-area:volume ratio (SA:V) for a 3-dimensional ball, showing the ratio decline inversely as the radius of the ball increases. A solid sphere or ball is a three-dimensional object, being the solid figure bounded by a sphere. (In geometry, the term sphere properly refers only to the surface, so a sphere thus lacks volume in this ...
The formula for the surface area of a sphere is more difficult to derive: because a sphere has nonzero Gaussian curvature, it cannot be flattened out. The formula for the surface area of a sphere was first obtained by Archimedes in his work On the Sphere and Cylinder. The formula is: [6] A = 4πr 2 (sphere), where r is the radius of the sphere.
For example, assuming the Earth is a sphere of radius 6371 km, the surface area of the arctic (north of the Arctic Circle, at latitude 66.56° as of August 2016 [7]) is 2π ⋅ 6371 2 | sin 90° − sin 66.56° | = 21.04 million km 2 (8.12 million sq mi), or 0.5 ⋅ | sin 90° − sin 66.56° | = 4.125% of the total surface area of the Earth.
where S n − 1 (r) is an (n − 1)-sphere of radius r (being the surface of an n-ball of radius r) and dA is the area element (equivalently, the (n − 1)-dimensional volume element). The surface area of the sphere satisfies a proportionality equation similar to the one for the volume of a ball: If A n − 1 (r) is the surface area of an (n ...