You might know some or all of this introduction but here's all of it for pedantic reasons. So, there's this thing called multiplicative persistence, which is basically the count of times a number can be reduced by multiplying its digits together until the result is a single digit number. For example, 89 has an MP of 3 because it takes three steps to reduce it to a single digit number:
89
8*9 = 72
7*2 = 14
1*4 = 4
Now, if you take some time to investigate, it turns out that many numbers fail at having a high MP rather quickly: they devolve because at some point 2 and 5 meet and form a 10, and that zero is a sink. Multiplying with 1 keeps the score, but reduces the number of digits available for the next step; all of this rings to me like either a structure (group maybe) or an extension on the ring of natural numbers, but I'm not sure about it yet. At any rate, the highest MP ever found is 11. It isn't proven that that is the highest possible, but extensive checking suggests it. One such number is 277