Barycentric Rational Interpolation Ranks Tennis Greats

On the eve of Wimbledon, Ian McHale, director of the Centre for Sports Business at England's University of Salford, revealed his statistical model's pick for the greatest tennis player of all time.

McHale and co-author Rose Baker fed the results of 20,640 grand slam matches into a "dynamic paired comparisons model...utilising barycentric rational interpolation" and, based on this analysis, identified...drum roll...Jimmy Connors as the best ever.

Read the Guardian's coverage (which includes speculation about future applications of statistical number crunching to sports).