In a series of recent papers a hierarchy of lower dimensional theories for 
nonlinearly elastic thin beams has been rigorously derived, starting from 
three-dimensional elasticity, by means of Gamma-convergence.
This approach guarantees convergence of minimizers of the 3d elastic 
energy to minimizers of the reduced problem.
In this talk the convergence of (possibly non-minimizing) stationary 
points of the 3d elastic energy is discussed.
This is a joint work with S. Mueller and M. Schultz.