Consider the eighth-sphere . What is the area of its projection onto the plane ?
Solution
Consider the three flat faces of the eighth-ball. Each of these is a quarter-circle of radius 1, so each has area . Furthermore, the projections of these faces cover the desired area without overlap. To find the projection factor one can find the cosine of the angle between the planes, which is the same as the angle between their normal vectors. Using the dot product formula for the cosine of the angle between two vectors, . Therefore, each area is multiplied by by the projection, so the area of the projection is .
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