Surprise study
A study published in the scientific journal PLoS ONE has worked out that Jimmy Connors was the best tennis player who ever lived.
Boffin Filippo Radicchi built a complex data set on his computer and developed a diffusion algorithm to look at the data. He ran all the matches played by professional tennis players between 1968 and 2010, and, on the basis of this data set, constructed a directed and weighted network of contacts and graphs.
Players who had numerous wins over highly ranked players received bonus points and ended up as the top players. So now you know that if a computer was ever to play tennis it would not be against Jimmy Connors. While Connors was a big name on the tennis circuit in his day, having his name pop up as the world’s best is a little of a surprise.
Here are the study’s top 10:
1. Jimmy Connors
2. Ivan Lendl
3. John McEnroe
4. Guillermo Vilas
5. Andre Agassi
6. Stefan Edberg
7. Roger Federer
8. Pete Sampras
9. Ilie Nastase
10. Bjorn Borg
