This paper considers compressed sensing and affine rank minimization in both noiseless and noisy cases and establishes sharp restricted isometry conditions for sparse signal and low-rank matrix recovery. The analysis relies on a key technical tool which represents points in a polytope by convex combinations of sparse vectors. The technique is elementary while leads to sharp results. It is shown that for any given constant $t\ge {4/3}$, in compressed sensing $δ_{tk}^A < \sqrt{(t-1)/t}$ guarantees the exact recovery of all $k$ sparse signals in the noiseless case through the constrained $\ell_1$ minimization, and similarly in affine rank minimization $δ_{tr}^\mathcal{M}< \sqrt{(t-1)/t}$ ensures the exact reconstruction of all matrices with rank at most $r$ in the noiseless case via the constrained nuclear norm minimization. Moreover, for any $ε>0$, $δ_{tk}^A<\sqrt{\frac{t-1}{t}}+ε$ is not sufficient to guarantee the exact recovery of all $k$-sparse signals for large $k$. Similar result also holds for matrix recovery. In addition, the conditions $δ_{tk}^A < \sqrt{(t-1)/t}$ and $δ_{tr}^\mathcal{M}< \sqrt{(t-1)/t}$ are also shown to be sufficient respectively for stable recovery of approximately sparse signals and low-rank matrices in the noisy case.