For the surface area of a tricylinder, permutation symmetry shows that each of the three cylindrical surfaces contributes the same surface area to the boundary. On the face , put , . The remaining two inequalities require
so . The surface area element on this unit circular cylinder is . There are eight congruent angular sectors, with the minimum equal to for . Thus the area of this face is
Every boundary point lies on at least one of these three cylindrical surfaces; their pairwise intersections are curves of zero surface area. Adding the three faces therefore gives