A student asked me about a paper by Daniel Biss (MIT Ph.D. and Illinois state senator) proving that "circles are really just bloated triangles." The only published source I could find was the young adult novel *[An Abundance of Katherines](https://books.google.com/books?id=3O40B12Q4xoC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false)* by John Green, which includes the following sentence:

*Daniel [Biss] is world famous in the math world, partly because of a paper he published a few years ago that apparently proves that circles are basically fat, bloated triangles.*

This is probably just Green's attempt to replicate something Biss told him about topology (an example of homotopy, perhaps).

But the statement seems to have intrigued students and non-mathematicians online. So I'm curious: has anyone seen such a paper? Is this a simplified interpretation of a real result (maybe in *[The homotopy type of the matroid grassmannian](http://annals.math.princeton.edu/2003/158-3/p04)*?).