Gábor Korchmáros was born in 1948 in Makó (Hungary). He graduated at the Eötvös University in 1971. Since 1987, he is a full professor at the University of Basilicata (Italy), where he acted as the head of department and a dean as well. In 2008, he received the Euler Medal of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (Canada). He has 239 scientific publications , with 1649 citations and Hirsch index 21. The essential part of his scientific results belongs to discrete mathematics, in particular to finite geometry. He is a leading expert of the theory of ovals and their generalizations in higher dimensional spaces over finite fields. In the last 15 years, his main field of interest has been the theory of algebraic curves over finite fields and their automorphism groups. In 2008 he wrote a monograph with two co-authors, which serves as a basic reference on this area. The new class of maximal curves constructed by him and his student in 2009 was a major breakthrough in the theory. This class is referred to as “GK curves” and is intensively investigated from both the pure and applied mathematical aspects. Gábor Korchmáros is working actively in doctoral schools of several universities. He supervised 8 PhD dissertations. Since 2006, he has been coordinating the joint “János Bolyai Doctoral Seminar” of Szeged and several Italian universities. Since 1990 he continually keeps the fruitful scientific contact with the researchers and students of the Bolyai Institute.