Disc functionals and Siciak-Zaharyuta extremal functions on singular varieties

Abstract: We establish plurisubharmonicity of envelopes of certain classical disc functionals on locally irreducible complex spaces, thereby generalizing the corresponding results for complex manifolds. We also find new formulae expressing the Siciak-Zaharyuta extremal function of an open set in a locally irreducible affine algebraic variety as the envelope of certain disc functionals, similarly to what has been done for open sets in C^n by Lempert and by Larusson and Sigurdsson.