It's very easy to let your brain fool yourself in understanding maths - after staring at a statement for a while, you start to think you understand it, chances are you don't.

it took me 15 minutes once to understand one equation. It was the derivation of the Taylor series for the tangent function. It was a very old textbook for calculus (from the beginning of the 20th century) and it applied techniques which are not teached nowadays, so it is possible to understand mathematical expressions after staring at it ;)

Is it broken? Seems still no one solved RSA-1024 challenge.

The state actors aren't going to reveal their capabilities by solving an open challenge.