The operational Chow cohomology classes of a complete toric variety are identified with certain functions, called Minkowski weights, on the corresponding fan. The natural product of Chow cohomology classes makes the Minkowski weights into a commutative ring; the product is computed by a displacement in the lattice, which corresponds to a deformation in the toric variety. We show that, with rational coefficients, this ring embeds in McMullen's polytope algebra, and that the polytope algebra is the direct limit of these Chow rings, over all compactifications of a given torus. In the nonsingular case, the Minkowski weight corresponding to the Todd class is related to a certain Ehrhart polynomial. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd
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