Not sure if you mean to be pointlessly snarky or not, but hearing about his thought process and how he got a quick algorithm for a harder problem to work would

Not sure if you mean to be pointlessly snarky or not, but hearing about his thought process and how he got a quick algorithm for a harder problem to work would have been much more interesting - and from a storytelling POV, would have been much better - than an abrupt "and then he came up with the solution", especially after the long bit on how he generated ovals.