  The study of slender elastic structures is an archetypical problem in
continuum mechanics, dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, with a rich
history dating back to Euler's seminal work in the 18th century. These
filamentary elastic structures have widespread applications in engineering and
biology, examples of which include cables, textile industry, DNA experiments,
collagen modelling etc. One is typically interested in the equilibrium
configurations of these rod-like structures, their stability and dynamic
evolution and all three questions have been extensively addressed in the
literature. However, it is generally recognized that there are still several
open non-trivial questions related to three-dimensional analysis of rod
equilibria, inclusion of topological and positional constraints and different
kinds of boundary conditions.
