Solid angle of its faces is one-sixth of that, or sr. Solid angles can also be measured in square degrees (1 sr = () square degrees), in square minutes and square seconds, or in fractions of the sphere (1 sr = fractional area), also known as spat (1 sp = 4 sr). In spherical coordinates there is a formula for the differential, where is the colatitude (angle from the North pole) and is the longitude. The solid angle for an arbitrary oriented surface S subtended at a point P is equal to the solid angle of the projection of the surface S
Surface area of infinitesimal calculus and involves partial derivatives and double integration. A general definition of surface area was sought by Henri Lebesgue and Hermann Minkowski at the turn of the twentieth century. Their work led to the development of geometric measure theory, which studies various notions of surface area for irregular objects of any dimension. An important example is the Minkowski content of a surface. While the areas of many simple surfaces have been known since antiquity, a rigorous mathematical "definition" of area requires a great deal of care. This should provide a function which assigns a positive real number to