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 ℂⁿ by Lempert and by Lárusson and Sigurdsson.

Given an irreducible algebraic curves $A$ in ${ℂ}^N$, let $m_d$ be the dimension of the complex vector space of all holomorphic polynomials of degree at most $d$ restricted to $A$. Let $K$ be a nonpolar compact subset of $A$, and for each $d=1,2,...,$ choose $m_d$ points ${\left\{A_{dj}\right\}}_{j=1,...,m_d}$ in $K$. Finally, let ${\Lambda }_d$ be the $d$-th Lebesgue constant of the array $\left\{A_{dj}\right\}$; i.e., ${\Lambda }_d$ is the operator norm of the Lagrange interpolation operator $L_d$ acting on $C\left(K\right)$, where $L_d\left(f\right)$ is the Lagrange interpolating polynomial for $f$ of degree $d$ at the points ${\left\{A_{dj}\right\}}_{j=1,...,m_d}$. Using techniques of pluripotential...