A sphere is a 2-dimensional surface produced by finding the set of all points that are an equal distance from another point in 3-dimensional space. A unit sphere is a sphere that ensures all points on the sphere are distance one from the center. Because it is curved, it is often represented embedded in 3-dimensional space. A sphere is the shape of the exterior of a ball. It is the 2-dimensional hypersphere. Spherical geometry does not follow all of Euclid's axioms.
The sphere of radius r and center c is the set of all points that are at the same distance r from point c in 3-dimensional Euclidean space:
where is euclidean metric for three-dimensional space:
.
The volume V inside a sphere of radius r can be calculated using expression:
.
The surface area of a sphere is:
.
Generalizations[]
Generalization of sphere for euclidean spaces of arbitrary dimension is hypersphere (n-sphere).
Speaking even more generally, for a metric space (M,d), where M is a set and d is a metric (distance function), the sphere S of radius r and center c is the set: