Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury from the University of California, Los Angeles, analysed the fame of "ace" pilots who fought for Germany during the World War I by comparing the number of web pages that now mention each pilot with the number of planes that the pilot shot down.

They discovered that rather than being directly proportional, the fame of the pilots actually increases exponentially with the number of planes they shot down. This means that fame is not distributed fairly among the 393 pilots in the sample.

"The exponential will blow up small differences in merit," explains Roychowdhury. For example, the "Red Baron" - Manfred von Richthofen - is the most famous of all the German aces, with 4720 Google hits. He also shot down the most planes, 80 in total, before he died in battle. This represents only 1.6 per cent of the total number of planes shot down, yet he gained 27 per cent of the fame...