Surface area Surface area The surface area of a solid object is a measure of the total area that the surface of the object occupies. The mathematical definition of surface area in the presence of curved surfaces is considerably more involved than the definition of arc length of one-dimensional curves, or of the surface area for polyhedra (i.e., objects with flat polygonal faces), for which the surface area is the sum of the areas of its faces. Smooth surfaces, such as a sphere, are assigned surface area using their representation as parametric surfaces. This definition of surface area is based on methods
Surface area but not on its position and orientation in space. This means that surface area is invariant under the group of Euclidean motions. These properties uniquely characterize surface area for a wide class of geometric surfaces called "piecewise smooth". Such surfaces consist of finitely many pieces that can be represented in the parametric form with a continuously differentiable function formula_4 The area of an individual piece is defined by the formula Thus the area of "S" is obtained by integrating the length of the normal vector formula_6 to the surface over the appropriate region "D" in the parametric "uv" plane. The