Who's the best tennis player?

For the Summer of Math Exposition 4 (SoME4) contest, I cooked up the video above. The idea is simple: can we use a mathematical model (the Elo system) to find the current most skillful tennis player?

I was devastated to learn that people have been using Elo for sports for a long time, and Jeff Sackman even has a weekly updating Elo ranking for tennis. But was I really going to sit around and say that the answer already exists? I figured one of the coolest things would be to actually use the Elo system for my own games. So in this video I tried it out with my friend, Suriya.

The goal of the video is to have fun with math and and promote curiosity and excitement. It is not about explaining the Elo system in any other depth, contrary to what my SoME4 reviewers said. Though some of the feedback was useful and I incorporated it in the video linked above.

Summary

Have a watch of my video above. I promise it will be fun.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Suriya S. for playing in this video and offering perspective from inside the tennis community. Thank you to Jeffrey P. for insightful comments as this video was conceived. Thank you to the SoME4 reviewers for their feedback.