Work on the unit sphere with geodesic edges. A spherical lune of angle has area . The three great circles through the sides of a spherical triangle partition the sphere into four antipodal pairs of triangles. If the original triangle has area and the other pair representatives have areas , then . The three lunes at its vertices have areas , so
This proves the spherical excess formula . Triangulate a convex spherical -gon from one vertex into triangles; summing areas and vertex angles gives
For a decomposition of the whole sphere, angles around every vertex sum to and each edge belongs to two faces. Summing the polygon area formula over all faces therefore gives
Now , , and , since three edges meet at each vertex. Substituting into Euler's formula yields . Nonnegative integer solutions therefore give at most seven pairs:
At least three distinct pairs are realized: a dodecahedron gives , a pentagonal prism gives , and a cube gives . Center each convex polyhedron around an interior origin and radially project its faces onto the sphere; edges become great-circle arcs and the resulting spherical faces are convex, preserving the incidence counts. This supplies the required actual decompositions.