surface area

Type: Concept

As of November 2026, surface area has been mentioned in one podcast episode on NPR (Feb 2026). Discussed in the context of how it affects ski jumping performance.

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, 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 def