Lecture 34, Monday, 11/17/08: Section 14.6: Surface integrals

Topics

Read

Section 14.6. The vast majority of problems can be done by expressing the surface in the form z=f(x,y) and using the simpler formula (6.1) for dS. However, you should know the formula (6.2) for parametrized surfaces, and you should be able to apply it in simple cases such as spherical surfaces (where there is a natural parametrization given by spherical coordinates phi and theta). You can skim through the formal definitions (Riemann sums, etc.) and the proofs of the various formulas.

Homework

Section 14.6: 19, 21, 25, 29, 31, 37, 39, 49 (The first three problems above (19, 21, 25 in 14.6) are ordinary surface area computations of the type that came up in 13.4 and that could have been given in 13.4.)
Solutions.

Notes

As in the case of line integrals, there are two basic types of surface integrals: integrals over scalar functions g(x,y,z), and integrals over vector fields F, multiplied by a unit normal vector n. The first type is a simple extension of the double integral that gives a surface area (from Section 13.4), with the integrand 1 replaced by a more general function. The second type is analogous a line integral over F dr. Just like this line integral, which can be interpreted as a work integral, this latter surface integral has a physical interpretation: it denotes the net flow ("flux") of the vector field F across the surface S.

The vector version of a surface integral arises as the left side of the Divergence Theorem, one of the fundamental theorems of vector calculus, which can be thought of as a 3-dimensional version of Green's theorem.


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