Why are Turing Machines important?
It has been mentioned that Turing Machines only emulate one aspect of a computer. So why are they so important to the field of computer science? The answer is that Turing Machines are the simplest construct that is able to implement algorithms. Obviously algorithms can include certain things which we don’t think of as being able to be written on a tape solved symbolically. Yet, if there exists a problem of any type that is difficult to solve, and if that problem can be solved by an algorithm (ie. a sequence of finite steps), then a Turing Machine can represent the difficult part.
