But why is a sphere's surface area four times its shadow?



The formula is no mere coincidence.
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The first proof goes back to Greek times, due to Archimedes, who was charmed by the fact that a sphere has 2/3 the volume of a cylinder encompassing it, and 2/3 the surface area as well (if you consider the caps). Check out this video for another beautiful animation of that first proof:

Calculus series:

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These animations are largely made using manim, a scrappy open-source python library:

If you want to check it out, I feel compelled to warn you that it’s not the most well-documented tool, and it has many other quirks you might expect in a library someone wrote with only their own use in mind.

Music by Vincent Rubinetti.
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If you want to contribute translated subtitles or to help review those that have already been made by others and need approval, you can click the gear icon in the video and go to subtitles/cc, then “add subtitles/cc”. I really appreciate those who do this, as it helps make the lessons accessible to more people.

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3blue1brown is a channel about animating math, in all senses of the word animate. And you know the drill with YouTube, if you want to stay posted on new videos, subscribe:

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0:00 – High-level idea
2:23 – The details
9:12 – Limit to a smooth surface
11:20 – The second proof
15:15 – A more general shadow fact.

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