c-fans and Newton polyhedra of algebraic varieties

To every algebraic subvariety of a complex torus there corresponds a Euclidean geometric object called a c-fan. This correspondence determines an intersection theory for algebraic varieties. c-fans form a graded commutative algebra with visually defined operations. The c-fans of algebraic varieties lie in the subring of rational c-fans. It seems that other subrings may be used to construct an intersection theory for other categories of analytic varieties. We discover a relation between an old problem in the theory of convex bodies (the so-called Minkowski problem) and the ring of c-fans. This enables us to define a correspondence that sends any algebraic curve to a convex polyhedron in the space of characters of the torus.