Solid angle is much, much farther away. The solid angle subtended by the complete ()-dimensional spherical surface of the unit sphere in -dimensional Euclidean space can be defined in any number of dimensions . One often needs this solid angle factor in calculations with spherical symmetry. It is given by the formula where is the gamma function. When is an integer, the gamma function can be computed explicitly. It follows that This gives the expected results of 4 steradians for the 3D sphere bounded by a surface of area and 2 radians for the 2D circle bounded by a circumference of length
Cylinder . The area of the side is known as the "", . An "open cylinder" does not include either top or bottom elements, and therefore has surface area (lateral area) The surface area of the solid right circular cylinder is made up the sum of all three components: top, bottom and side. Its surface area is therefore, where is the diameter of the circular top or bottom. For a given volume, the right circular cylinder with the smallest surface area has . Equivalently, for a given surface area, the right circular cylinder with the largest volume has , that is,