Calculate Surface Area of a Sphere in Java()

Step 1: Understand the Problem

To calculate the surface area of a sphere, we can use the following mathematical formula: 4πr². Here, r represents the radius of the sphere. Our task is to create a Java function that takes a radius value as an argument and returns the calculated surface area.

public double calculateSurfaceArea(double radius) {
    // Function implementation will go here
}

Step 2: Importing Necessary Java Library

Since we are dealing with the value of π, we need to use the Java Math library. It provides the constant value for π and power functions that we need to complete our calculation.

import java.lang.Math;

Step 3: Implementing the Formula

The Math library allows us to conveniently call π as Math.PI. To square the radius, we can use the Math.pow method, which takes two arguments - the base and the exponent. In this case, our base is the radius and the exponent is 2.

Math.pow(radius, 2) 

Step 4: Completing the Function

Now, we simply need to multiply our previous result with 4π to get the surface area of the sphere. This will be returned by our function.

public double calculateSurfaceArea(double radius) {
    double surfaceArea = 4 * Math.PI * Math.pow(radius, 2);
    return surfaceArea;
}

Conclusion

We have now successfully implemented a Java function that calculates and returns the surface area of a sphere given its radius as an input. The use of Java's Math library has simplified our task tremendously.