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
Solid of revolution the curves of and and the lines and about the -axis is given by If (e.g. revolving an area between curve and -axis), this reduces to: The method can be visualized by considering a thin vertical rectangle at with height , and revolving it about the -axis; it forms a cylindrical shell. The lateral surface area of a cylinder is , where is the radius (in this case ), and is the height (in this case ). Summing up all of the surface areas along the interval gives the total volume. When a curve is defined by its parametric form