Residuality in the set of norm attaining operators between Banach spaces

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 $x\in C$ is attained are dense, then the $G_\delta$ 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 Fr\'{e}chet 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 $G_\delta$ 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, among which we point out that 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.