Born: 8 April 1917, United States
Died: 19 October 2007
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Tim
American mathematician and computer scientist Winifred “Tim” Alice Asprey was one of only 200 or so women to earn a PhD in mathematics from American universities in the 1940s. While earning her undergraduate degree at Vassar, she met math professor and future computer science pioneer Grace Hopper. After graduating in 1938, she taught at schools in New York City and Chicago before earning her Master’s (1942) and PhD (1945) from the University of Iowa and returning to Vassar as a professor.
Hopper had moved to Philadelphia, where she was working on the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer). With a growing interest in the emerging field of computer science, Asprey visited her former teacher to learn more. She taught math and computer science at Vassar for 38 years, serving as chair of the math department from 1957 until she retired in 1982. She started the first computer science courses at Vassar, beginning in 1963. Her efforts to secure funds for the college’s first computer made Vassar only the second college in the U.S. to own an IBM System/360 computer in 1967. More than two decades later, the computer center she started was named the Asprey Advanced Computation Laboratory in her honor in 1989.