NORTH CANTON, Ohio -- A computer science professor at the University of Central Missouri this month found the largest prime number ever discovered, at 22 million digits long.

That prime number -- divisible by only 1 and itself -- was verified this week by a supercomputer at Squirrels, a software development company in North Canton.

It is the first world record breaking number since 2013 and was discovered as part of a network of computers strung together around the world through a collaborative called GIMPS, or Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.

Once the algorithm, run since 1996, finds a prime number, the group delegates to a member with a more powerful computer to verify that the new, really long number is actually prime. That job went to David Stanfill, president of Squirrels and a participant in the GIMPS program.

Here is a look at the new prime number, by the numbers (pun intended):

68 miles: The distance the new record holding number would stretch if written out completely.

2 74,207,281 -1

: How the new prime number is written mathematically.

7 million: The number of commas in the new number.

31 days: The time it took a Professor Curtis Cooper's computer at the University of Central Missouri, working around the clock, to discover the prime number.

That discovery actually happened last September, but an automatic email that is supposed to notify GIMPS mathematicians of a new find failed, and Cooper's world record find went missing in a database of millions and millions of digits. It wasn't until there was maintenance performed on the computer network that the new discovery was found Jan. 7.

3.5 days: The time it took Stanfill's supercomputer in Canton, equipped with an AMD Fury X processor, to replicate the original result.

"The risk of an error in the initial discovery is around 2 in 100," Stanfill said, "but the risk of a matching verification done on different hardware finding the exact same result erroneously is infinitesimally small."

49: The number of Mersenne prime numbers discovered over the last 500 years. Mersenne prime numbers are large, extremely rare prime numbers that are believed to be infinite. Mersenne.org has a list of all known prime numbers, including this month's discovery.

That's about one new discovery every 10 years, on average.

Infinite: The society of mathematicians is chasing an ancient map drawn by the Greek mathematician Euclid that depicted an infinite number of prime numbers.

None: There is no practical use for finding such a large prime number, Cooper said, but the large network of computer scientists has had many supplementary benefits.

"The idea of having a big distributed computer network to solve some problems like in this case, large prime numbers, can be very valuable," Cooper said.

Computing networks are able to do the work of a very large, expensive supercomputer at a much lower cost.