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A Mathematical Theory of Fame

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Abstract

We study empirically how the fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces, measured in numbers of web pages mentioning them, is related to their achievement, measured in numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on the average fame grows exponentially with achievement; the correlation coefficient between achievement and the logarithm of fame is 0.72. The number of people with a particular level of achievement decreases exponentially with the level, leading to a power-law distribution of fame. We propose a stochastic model that can explain the exponential growth of fame with achievement. Next, we hypothesize that the same functional relation between achievement and fame that we found for the aces holds for other professions. This allows us to estimate achievement for professions where an unquestionable and universally accepted measure of achievement does not exist. We apply the method to Nobel Prize winners in Physics. For example, we obtain that Paul Dirac, who is a hundred times less famous than Einstein contributed to physics only two times less. We compare our results with Landau’s ranking.

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Notes

  1. We collected the data used during the work on Ref. [4] that is in 2003. Today’s numbers of Google hits are different.

  2. The list includes all of the pre-WWII Nobel Laureates in Physics, excluding Charles Wilson who had so many namesakes that his fame was impossible to determine.

  3. These are the only people from Table 1, whose Landau rankings were given in [14] or [15].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1594, USA

    M. V. Simkin & V. P. Roychowdhury

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  1. M. V. Simkin
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  2. V. P. Roychowdhury
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Correspondence to M. V. Simkin.

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Simkin, M.V., Roychowdhury, V.P. A Mathematical Theory of Fame. J Stat Phys 151, 319–328 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-012-0677-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10955-012-0677-5

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