Let be the interior of the tetrahedron, and take any constant vector field . Its divergence is zero, so the divergence theorem gives
Choosing to be each Cartesian basis vector proves . This is the general fact that vector areas of a closed polyhedron sum to zero, specialized to four faces. The outward orientations are essential: the scalar face areas are all positive and do not sum to zero.
For the triangular face, take the cross product of two edges and divide by two:
The origin lies on the opposite side from this normal, since . Thus this is already the outward vector area, with
The vector areas of a closed polyhedron sum to zero, so the sum for the remaining three faces is
Figure 1.
Tetrahedron with its highlighted face PQR and outward unit normal
. Details.
Their individual outward vector areas are , , and , which directly check that sum.