  We study empirically how fame of WWI fighter-pilot aces, measured in numbers
of web pages mentioning them, is related to their achievement or merit,
measured in numbers of opponent aircraft destroyed. We find that on the average
fame grows exponentially with achievement; to be precise, there is a strong
correlation (~0.7) between achievement and the logarithm of fame. At the same
time, the number of individuals achieving a particular level of merit decreases
exponentially with the magnitude of the level, leading to a power-law
distribution of fame. A stochastic model that can explain the exponential
growth of fame with merit is also proposed.
