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
Surface-area-to-volume ratio very large surface area for a given volume. The surface-area-to-volume ratio has physical dimension L (inverse length) and is therefore expressed in units of inverse distance. As an example, a cube with sides of length 1 cm will have a surface area of 6 cm and a volume of 1 cm. The surface to volume ratio for this cube is thus For a given shape, SA:V is inversely proportional to size. A cube 2 cm on a side has a ratio of 3 cm, half that of a cube 1 cm on a side. Conversely, preserving SA:V as size increases