TITLE: Uniform distribution on the surface of unit sphere
QUESTION [21 upvotes]: It is known that given $X=(X_1, X_2, \ldots, X_n)$ iid $\sim N(0,1)$, then $X/\sqrt{X_1^2+\cdots+X_n^2}$ is uniformly distributed on the surface of unit sphere.
Intuitively, I know that that's because the probability of $X/\sqrt{X_1^2+\cdots+X_n^2}$ belonging to any region with the same area on the surface should be the same. But how can I prove it mathematically?

REPLY [12 votes]: Suppose $X=(X_1, X_2, \ldots, X_n)$ iid and $X_1 \sim N(0,1)$, then $X \sim N(0, I_n)$, where $N(0, I_n)$ is the multivariate normal distribution with zero-mean and identity covariance matrix. From that it follows, that if $O$ is an orthogonal matrix, that $OX$ is identically distributed with $X$. From that it follows, that $Y = \frac{X}{||X||_2}$ is identically distributed with $\frac{OX}{||OX||_2} = \frac{OX}{||X||_2}$. From that we can conclude, that $Y$ is invariant under rotations and belongs to the unit sphere. There is only one probability distribution, that satisfies both those conditions at the same time: that is the uniform distribution on the unit sphere.