In 1991, the Mathematics Department established an annual series of lectures featuring the country's most prominent mathematicians. The lecture series is in honor of Winifred Asprey '38, a Vassar graduate who taught mathematics and computer science at Vassar for 38 years before her retirement in 1982. Professor Asprey was one of the most admired members of the Vassar faculty and was nationally recognized as a spokesperson for mathematics and computer science. She founded Vassar's Computer Center in the mid 1960's—one of the first such at a liberal arts college. Professor Asprey continues to live in the Poughkeepsie area.
Here is a list of all of the Asprey Lecturers in Mathematics:
| 1991–92 | Stephen Smale | Chaos and the Godel Incompleteness Theorem |
| 1992–93 | William P. Thurston | An Introduction to the Geometry and Topology of Three-dimensional Manifolds |
| 1993–94 | Kenneth Ribet | Fermat's Last Theorem |
| 1994–95 | John H. Conway | Shapes and Symmetries |
| 1995–96 | Joan Birman | Knots, Differential Equations, and Chaos |
| 1996–97 | Angus MacIntyre | What Can Logic Tell Us About the Real Exponential Function? |
| 1997–98 | Charles Fefferman | Atoms, Numbers, and Stars |
| 1999–2000 | Sir Michael Atiyah | Atoms, Knots, and Elementary Particles |
| 2000–01 | Vaughan Jones |
Noncommutative Geometry for Dummies |
| 2002–03 | Peter Neumann | The Memoirs of Évariste Galois |
| 2003–04 | Hendrik Lenstra | Escher and the Droste Effect |
| 2004–05 | Jeff Weeks | The Shape of Space |
| 2005–06 | Ken Ono | Number Theory: Partitions and the Legacy of Dyson and Ramanujan |
| 2006–07 | Jon Kleinberg | Modeling the Web, Mining my E-mail, and Other Perspectives on the Information Revolution |
| 2007–08 | Avi Wigderson | A world view through the computational lens |