Residuality in the set of norm attaining operators between Banach spaces

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We study the relationship between the residuality of the set of norm attaining functionals on a Banach space and the residuality and the denseness of the set of norm attaining operators between Banach spaces. Our first main result says that if C is a bounded subset of a Banach space X which admit an LUR renorming satisfying that, for every Banach space Y, the operators T from X to Y for which the supremum of ‖Tx‖ with x∈C is attained are dense, then the Gδ set of those functionals which strongly exposes C is dense in X⁎. This extends previous results by J. Bourgain and K.-S. Lau. The particular case in which C is the unit ball of X, in which we get that the norm of X⁎ is Fréchet differentiable at a dense subset, improves a result by J. Lindenstrauss and we even present an example showing that Lindenstrauss' result was not optimal. In the reverse direction, we obtain results for the density of the Gδ set of absolutely strongly exposing operators from X to Y by requiring that the set of strongly exposing functionals on X is dense and conditions on Y or Y⁎ involving RNP and discreteness on the set of strongly exposed points of Y or Y⁎. These results include examples in which even the denseness of norm attaining operators was unknown. We also show that the residuality of the set of norm attaining operators implies the denseness of the set of absolutely strongly exposing operators provided the domain space and the dual of the range space are separable, extending a recent result for functionals. Finally, our results find important applications to the classical theory of norm-attaining operators, to the theory of norm-attaining bilinear forms, to the geometry of the preduals of spaces of Lipschitz functions, and to the theory of strongly norm-attaining Lipschitz maps. In particular, we solve a proposed open problem showing that the unique predual of the space of Lipschitz functions from the Euclidean unit circle fails to have Lindenstrauss property A.