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The epithelial tissue lining the digestive tract contains microvilli, greatly increasing the area available for absorption. Animals use their teeth to grind food down into smaller particles, increasing the surface area available for digestion. The surface area of an organism is important in several considerations, such as regulation of body temperature and digestion.
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The inner membrane of the mitochondrion has a large surface area due to infoldings, allowing higher rates of cellular respiration (electron micrograph). ( September 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.
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Let the radius be r and the height be h (which is 2 r for the sphere). The below given formulas can be used to show that the surface area of a sphere and cylinder of the same radius and height are in the ratio 2 : 3, as follows. Ratio of surface areas of a sphere and cylinder of the same radius and height A cone, sphere and cylinder of radius r and height h. While the areas of many simple surfaces have been known since antiquity, a rigorous mathematical definition of area requires a great deal of care. An important example is the Minkowski content of a surface. Their work led to the development of geometric measure theory, which studies various notions of surface area for irregular objects of any dimension. This definition of surface area is based on methods of infinitesimal calculus and involves partial derivatives and double integration.Ī general definition of surface area was sought by Henri Lebesgue and Hermann Minkowski at the turn of the twentieth century. Smooth surfaces, such as a sphere, are assigned surface area using their representation as parametric surfaces. 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. The surface area (symbol A) of a solid object is a measure of the total area that the surface of the object occupies. A sphere of radius r has surface area 4 πr 2.
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