this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Surface area of cylindrical human

How to spot a mathematician/physicist.

[โ€“] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I'm actually a chemist, thankyouverymuch

#Chemistry Is When There's Too Many Electrons For The Physicists

;)

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I feel like a mathematician would go a step further and not even assume a specific geometry. Maybe a human is just a subset of points in a measure space, with a measure fixed at 1 human-unit.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, the result of this calculation only depends on the area/volume ratio of the human. I used the specific cylinder, because humans are roughly cylindrical, and have a volume of roughly 100 L. The surface area of a regular human is probably a bit larger than that of a cylindrical one though.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's true, and in this case where the layer is a single molecule thick, pores and even cellular structure will add to it quite a bit. Hell, at that scale it's probably hard to define any solid boundary to the body at all, since you'll have things like the surface of evaporating sweat. Once again, we need to know a bit more about how the magic works to give a single answer.

Our mathematician would have to add a measure on subset boundaries I guess. Or maybe just hand the problem off to a big boy who can handle things in the real world (zing!).