Solid angle orientation formula_9, and distance from the viewer as: where the surface area of a sphere is . The solid angle of a cone with its apex at the apex of the solid angle, and with apex angle 2, is the area of a spherical cap on a unit sphere For small such that , this reduces to the area of a circle . The above is found by computing the following double integral using the unit surface element in spherical coordinates: This formula can also be derived without the use of calculus. Over 2200 years ago Archimedes proved that the
Surface area lead to different limiting values of the area; this example is known as the Schwarz lantern. Various approaches to a general definition of surface area were developed in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century by Henri Lebesgue and Hermann Minkowski. While for piecewise smooth surfaces there is a unique natural notion of surface area, if a surface is very irregular, or rough, then it may not be possible to assign an area to it at all. A typical example is given by a surface with spikes spread throughout in a dense fashion. Many surfaces of this type occur