  Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However,
despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there
exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of
comparing that of two individuals. We argue that, even if fame is difficult to
measure with precision, one may develop useful metrics for fame that correlate
well with intuition and that remain reasonably stable over time. Using datasets
of recently deceased individuals who were highly renowned, we have evaluated
several internet-based methods for quantifying fame. We find that some
widely-used internet-derived metrics, such as search engine results, correlate
poorly with human subject judgments of fame. However other metrics exist that
agree well with human judgments and appear to offer workable, easily accessible
measures of fame. Using such a metric we perform a preliminary investigation of
the statistical distribution of fame, which has some of the power law character
seen in other natural and social phenomena such as landslides and market
crashes. In order to demonstrate how such findings can generate quantitative
insight into celebrity culture, we assess some folk ideas regarding the
frequency distribution and apparent clustering of celebrity deaths.
