Norm derivatives and geometry of bilinear operators

We study the norm derivatives in the context of Birkhoff-James orthogonality in real Banach spaces. As an application of this, we obtain a complete characterization of the left-symmetric points and the right-symmetric points in a real Banach space in terms of the norm derivatives. We obtain a complete characterization of strong Birkhoff-James orthogonality in $\ell_1^n$ and $\ell_\infty^n$ spaces. We also obtain a complete characterization of the orthogonality relation defined by the norm derivatives in terms of some newly introduced variation of Birkhoff-James orthogonality. We further study Birkhoff-James orthogonality, approximate Birkhoff-James orthogonality, smoothness and norm attainment of bounded bilinear operators between Banach spaces.