So...How do I Find Surface Area of a Cube? Rectangular Prism? Cylinder? Composite?

Hello 9-06 and 9-05, who can help me out? I'm trying to find the most elegant algebaric expression to help me to find the surface area of a cube, rectangular prism, cylinder, or a composite of any of these shapes. What about the surface area of a triangular prism? How does symmetry help us solve some of these surface area problems? What happens if a part of any of these shapes is missing? How do I find surface area then? Help me out and post what you know over the next few days. Maybe someone can make a movie to explain the process?? Looking forward to some fantastic posts.



By the way 9-05 http://spmath90509.blogspot.com/ your explanations for, "Why 360 degrees?" really rock!! Keep up the great posts. Our place value is ones (1), tens (10), hundreds (100), thousands (1000) etc. Did anyone find out what 60 looks like in the Babylonian number system? What would be the next place value and what does it look like? or the next? Is there an easy way to write these numbers using our number system?