  The notion of group entropy is proposed. It enables to unify and generalize
many different definitions of entropy known in the literature, as those of
Boltzmann-Gibbs, Tsallis, Abe and Kaniadakis. Other new entropic functionals
are presented, related to nontrivial correlation laws characterizing
universality classes of systems out of equilibrium, when the dynamics is weakly
chaotic. The associated thermostatistics are discussed. The mathematical
structure underlying our construction is that of formal group theory, which
provides the general structure of the correlations among particles and dictates
the associated entropic functionals. As an example of application, the role of
group entropies in information theory is illustrated and generalizations of the
Kullback-Leibler divergence are proposed. A new connection between statistical
mechanics and zeta functions is established. In particular, Tsallis entropy is
related to the classical Riemann zeta function.
