title: Cyclically reduce a list of operands to a single result
body: <p>(This is a rehashed, self-answered version of another question which has been closed because it was not asked well.)</p>
  
  <p>I have a list of integers:</p>
  
  <pre><code>numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My goal is to alternatively apply the <strong>sum</strong> and <strong>multiplication</strong> operators successively on these numbers to get a single result.</p>
  
  <p>For example, for this input, the result is to be</p>
  
  <pre><code>((1 + 2) * 3 + 4) * 5 + 6
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Which reduces to 71. Essentially, this can be broken down into:</p>
  
  <pre><code>t1 =  1 + 2 
  t2 = t1 * 3 
  t3 = t2 + 4
  ... 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and so on. </p>
  
  <p>Bonus: A solution that can generalise to more than two cyclical operations would be welcome. </p>