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Consider a sphere of radius . We would like to find the surface area of this sphere.
We know that the volume of the sphere of radius is .
Calculating the derivative of with respect to ,
.
However, notice that the additional volume can be approximated by "unraveling" the outer shell of the sphere. Thus, the extra volume is roughly the surface area of the sphere times the additional radius . This approximation becomes more and more accurate as approaches zero, and it becomes exact in the limiting case.
Thus, , which means that , so .
This means that the surface area of a sphere is times the radius squared.