Jimmy Connors is best tennis player in the history of the game followed by Ivan Lendl and John McEnroe, according to a new research.

Male tennis players who played in at least one Association of Tennis Professionals match between 1968 and 2010 were evaluated through network analysis, said Filippo Radicchi, author of the study and a lifelong tennis fan.

One of the reasons Jimmy Connors ranks on top is because he played for more than 20 years and had the opportunity to win a lot of matches against other very good players, Radicchi said.

Radicchi ran an algorithm, similar to the one used by Google to rank Web pages, on digital data from hundreds of thousands of matches. He quantified the importance of players and ranked them by a tennis prestige score. This score is determined by a player’s competitiveness, the quality of his performance and number of victories.

In this particular ranking system, it’s more important to win a single match against a very good player than many matches against not-so-good players, said Radicchi, a physicist and postdoctoral fellow in the chemical and biological engineering department of Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Radicchi said he expects current greats Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal to eventually move up in the rankings if they face tough competition and continue to win matches.

The same application could be used to rank countries involved in the global trade of certain commodities, Radicchi said. In general, this type of analysis can help scientists better explain and understand complicated global relationships.

Radicchi plans to run this study again in 10 years to see how the rankings change.

Radicchi said ranking of top male tennis players produces some surprises. Here’s how the top 30 rank:

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
11. Boris Becker
12. Arthur Ashe
13. Brian Gottfried
14. Stan Smith
15. Manuel Orantes
16. Michael Chang
17. Roscoe Tanner
18. Eddie Dibbs
19. Harold Solomon
20. Tom Okker
21. Mats Wilander
22. Goran Ivanisevic
23. Vitas Gerulaitis
24. Rafael Nadal
25. Raul Ramirez
26. John Newcombe
27. Ken Rosewall
28. Yevgeny Kafelnikov
29. Andy Roddick
30. Thomas Muster

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