**5. Conclusion**

In this article, some analytical approximation techniques were employed in the elastic stability analysis of Euler columns. In a variety of such methods, ADM, VIM and HPM are widely used, and hence chosen for use in the computations. Firstly, a brief theoretical knowledge was given in the text, and then all of the methods were applied to the selected cases. Since the exact values for the buckling of a uniform rod were available, the analyses were initially conducted for that case. Results showed an excellent agreement with the exact ones that all three methods were highly effective in the computation of buckling loads and corresponding mode shapes. Finally, ADM, VIM and HPM were applied to the buckling of a rod having variable cross section. To this aim, a rod with exponentially varying radius was chosen and buckling loads with their corresponding mode shapes were obtained easily.

This study has shown that ADM, VIM and HPM can be used effectively in the analysis of elastic stability problems. It is possible to construct easy-to-use algorithms with these methods which are highly accurate and computationally efficient.
