The Koopman operator of a measure-preserving transformation
on a probability space
is the linear operator
on
defined by
It is an isometry. If is invertible and its inverse
is a measurable function,
is unitary, with inverse
. The constant functions form an invariant subspace,
and their orthogonal complement is the mean-zero
subspace
The restriction to this subspace describes the spectral behavior apart from the constant functions. The probability-preserving form of Banach's simple Lebesgue spectrum problem asks whether this entire restriction can have simple Lebesgue spectrum.