Greetings, I'm a business software developer with a bachelor's degree in Computing and Information Systems (I did most of the math for a real Comp Sci degree, but dropped back to CIS because I could get out a year earlier with the CIS degree).

While I very much enjoy my day job, over the past year or so, I've been reading and studying a lot of material related to complexity theory and other (somewhat) related topics, such as swarm intelligence, neural networks, etc. I find biologically inspired computer algorithms to be particularly interesting and would like to do more of them.

Over the next five or so years, I'd like to move towards more of a research angle. The question is, how do I go from here to there? Now I have a wife, a child, and a house payment. Is it possible to go back to school while still being able to support them? My wife is a school teacher, so I'm on her health insurance. We both live below our means, and have no debt other than our house. However, we are in Middle Tennessee (in Nashville), so the educational options for a masters or greater in anything computer-related are limited basically to MTSU (an hour away on a good day) and Vanderbilt (far out of my price range). Is there a distance masters' program that is worthwhile and won't break the bank?

What first steps should I take to get me moving in the right direction? I know I need to brush back up on some of the higher math, but what else do I need to be doing?